On Feb 29, 2012, at 7:00 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
On 2/28/12 12:04 PM, Mark Watson wrote:
I'm just trying to make it easy for
customers to watch TV shows and movies online, legally, on as many devices and in as convenient a way as possible.
I think that's a shared goal so far; the one additional caveat I would have is that in an ideal world a user should be able to do this on a device of their choosing, including a device the user built himself (or something like OLPC, etc; devices that happen to be produced by someone who is not an established player in the device-making space).
That would certainly be nice. Currently, we don't deliver content to devices we don't know anything about (specifically what kind of content protection they have). Our proposal could change that to 'we don't deliver content to CDMs we don't know anything about'. It should certainly be possible for a device manufacturer to include CDMs or at least ensure they are supported. As previously discussed, this should be easier than including/supporting plugins.
Or put another way, we want to avoid creating barriers to entry into the device-making space, if we can. That means avoiding unnecessary restrictions on both the hardware and the software of potential new devices.
We can all agree to avoid 'unnecessary' restrictions ;-)
Again, it's not immediately clear to me how to reconcile that with the current licensing regime of TV and movie content, just like it's not clear to me how to reconcile that licensing regime with fair use rights....
I don't see a big problem with the former unless you are talking about a 100% GPLv3 software stack. Content authors and software authors sometimes make incompatible choices about how they wish to license the product of their respective endeavors. They're both perfectly entitled to make those choices and I support them both. But I don't see how that should affect our work here and it is only one of several ways in which content and software can be incompatible.
The latter seems to be a matter of public policy which should not prevent us from supporting in HTML what is widely supported outside HTML today.
...Mark
-Boris